Reading East MP Rob Wilson: 'It’s important that the service providers recognise the immense frustrations felt by commuters'

Network Rail and First Great Western (FGW) have apologised for ‘a performance well below the standards customers should expect’.

Commuters suffered severe disruption to rail services on two occasions last week due to signalling problems.

Reading East MP Rob Wilson wrote to the two companies asking for a full explanation and received a joint letter from them offering sincere apologies and a review of procedures.

Mr Wilson said: “It’s good that Network Rail and First Great Western have apologised for the severe disruptions to the network.

“It’s important that the service providers recognise the immense frustrations felt by commuters when the system grinds to a halt.”

The letter from Patrick Hallgate, route managing director of Network Rail and Mark Hopwood, managing director of FGW, said power problems had caused signalling to fail.

The problem on Monday, October 6, was caused by a power cable being hit during the electrification programme and Network Rail has now scaled back these works to investigate how this had happened to avoid a recurrence of the failure.

A fault on Thursday, October 9, meant that while the signalling equipment was functioning correctly on the ground, staff in the Didcot Railway Operations Centre could not view the sequencing correctly which resulted in restrictions to the number of trains passing at a time.

This section of signalling, which is 50 years old in places, is due to be replaced by Easter next year.

The letter says: “It is very disappointing that these failures occurred and again we offer our sincere apologies. We are looking at all possibilities to both preserve the upgrade programme and eliminate the impact on passengers during these works.”

The bosses said a recent increase in the number of fatalities on the tracks also had an effect on services and they were looking at any ways of preventing future incidents.

Mr Wilson said: “Rail users deserve high levels of performance and I expect Network Rail and First Great Western to take effective action as promised to improve the service.

“I will continue to monitor the situation closely and hope that any detrimental impact on passengers during the upgrading works will be kept to an absolute minimum.”